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Christopher Hitchens

(April 13, 1949 – December 15, 2011)

Christopher Eric Hitchens was an Anglo-American author, columnist, essayist, orator, religious and literary critic, social critic, and journalist. He contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, and Vanity Fair. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays, on a range of subjects, including politics, literature, and religion. A staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure and public intellectual. Known for his contrarian stance on a number of issues, Hitchens criticised such public and generally popular figures as Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and Diana, Princess of Wales. He was the elder brother of the conservative journalist and author Peter Hitchens.

Having long described himself as a socialist, a Marxist and an anti-totalitarian, Hitchens began his break from the established political left after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the controversy over The Satanic Verses, followed by the left's embrace of Bill Clinton, and the antiwar movement's opposition to NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s.

An atheist, and a self-described antitheist, Hitchens viewed the concept of a god or a supreme being as a totalitarian belief that destroys individual freedom, and argued free expression and scientific discovery should replace religion as a means of teaching ethics and defining human civilisation. In 2007, Hitchens published his most popular book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, which was a New York Times bestseller.

In June 2010, Hitchens was on tour in New York promoting his memoirs Hitch-22 when he was taken into emergency care suffering from a severe pericardial effusion and then announced he was postponing his tour to undergo treatment for esophageal cancer. He announced that he was undergoing treatment in a Vanity Fair piece titled "Topic of Cancer". Hitchens said that he recognised the long-term prognosis was far from positive, and that he would be a "very lucky person to live another five years". Hitchens died on December 15, 2011 at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. According to Andrew Sullivan, his last words were "Capitalism. Downfall." In accordance with his wishes, his body was donated to medical research. Hitchens wrote a book-length work about his last illness, based on his Vanity Fair columns. Mortality was published in September 2012.

Hitchensweb 10th Anniversary Link 1997 interview with the Progressive by Sasha Abramsky
(Personal favorite is the description of Abdullah Ocalan. The site should be back in fighting shape soon.)

Christopher Hitchens interview by Harrison Jordan (Notable Interviews)
(for the curious, Hitchens is wearing a yarmulke because the interview was conducted in a Shul and it is respectful for even non-believers to wear one.)